What Does This Season Mean to You? AND Post High Holy Day Questionnaire

Simchat Torah is bittersweet. We celebrate the end of the High Holiday season. We feel an immense sense of accomplishment, joy and gratitude for getting to this moment. We unroll the entire Torah and notice its loving embrace, reminding ourselves that the Torah itself begins and ends with acts of Gemilut Hasadim (loving kindness). Hopefully the Torah we learn and teach should help us become kinder, more generous, more empathic and willing to serve. So we dance and sing and celebrate. 

Where then does the bitterness come in? We now enter the longest stretch of the Jewish calendar without a holiday or commemoration. Hanukkah is two months away. People return to their routines. It’s hard to descend from the high that comes from having all of us together in one place. 

So, before these awesome days become just another memory, we’d like to get your reflections in this questionnaire. Your answers will help us shape next year's High Holy Days. It takes about 7 minutes, and you may skip any question. Responses are anonymous unless you choose to share your name at the end.

As an incentive, we will make donations from our discretionary fund for the first 25 responses - who share their email - to the Tzedakah of their choosing. 

Here are some memories that we will hold dear from these days:

• Sharing the bima with Marty Edelman and Sir Tony Blair

• Being surrounded by so many leaders of our congregation, including teen leaders, who came for an Aliyah. 

• Kenneth Kuo playing cello at Kol Nidre and Claire Steinberg at Yizkor

• Seeing so many pop out of their seats to place a black stone on a table at the front of the sanctuary. 

• Watching a mother, her boyfriend, her two adult daughters and the fiancé of one standing in front at the open ark offering a prayer at Neilah.

• Doing Tashlich at Oakland Beach surrounded by sunbathers as summer took its last gasps. 

• Meeting so many new congregants to our community - welcome!

Those are just a few of our special memories. We’d like to read your favorite ones too. 

L’Shalom

Rabbi Daniel Gropper and Cantor Melanie Cooperman

Ps. If you are interested, links to the sermons delivered during these holidays - including the beautiful acapella rendition of “Landslide” . (You can find this at the end of the sermon.)

P.P.S. Each week we are going to share a synopsis of the weekly Torah portion and a brief deeper dive. It’s from our friends at simchattorahchallenge.org. Here is this week’s synopsis for V'Zot HaBerachah.